itop stands for it operational portal. itop is an open source web application for the day to day operations of an it environment. itop was designed with the itil best practices in mind but does not dictate any specific process, the application is flexible enough to adapt to your processes whether you want rather informal and pragmatic processes or a strict itil aligned behavior.
at the heart of itop is the cmdb (configuration management data base), this is originally the first part of itop that was developed. then came the tickets and all the derived processes.
the belief behind itop is that a cmdb must be an operational tool. the only way for a cmdb to be accurate and up to date is to be used daytoday by the it teams (support agents, it engineers, etc.). moreover, the more the cmdb is integrated with other it tools (monitoring systems, reporting tools, automated inventory, etc.), the better.
using itop you can:
? document your it infrastructure and all the relationships between the various pieces and stakeholders of the infrastructure (servers, applications, network devices, virtual machines, contacts, locations…)
? manage incidents, user requests, planned outages…
? document it services and contracts with external providers including service level agreements
? export all the information in a manual or scripted manner
? mass import (manually and using scripts) or synchronize/federate any data from external systems
itop can be used by different types of persons:
? help desk agents
? support engineers (1st level, 2nd level…)
? service managers
? it managers
? endusers: a simplified “portal” interface is available to let them submit their requests directly.
